Keith McMahon
Professor, Chinese Language and Literature
East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Kansas

Keith McMahon is professor in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Kansas, where he teaches Chinese language and literature. He studies fiction from the 16th to 19th centuries, male and female character types in literature and history, eroticism, the culture of opium smoking in 19th century China, the structure of sexuality in late imperial China, and the history of imperial marriage from the Han to the Qing dynasties. Recently he published Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (2010) and Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao (2013).

He received his B.A. in French and Comparative Literature from Indiana University, his M.A. in Chinese from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Chinese from Princeton University. He studied one year of Chinese language in Taiwan and did Ph.D. and post-doctorate research in Shanghai and Beijing for a total of five years. He has taught at the University of Kansas since 1984, where he was chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures from 1996 to 2008.

In the past decade, he has written on opium smoking in 19th and 20th century China and Euro-America; nineteenth-century fiction and sexuality in China on the verge of modernity; and the history of emperors and their wives and concubines, the institution of imperial polygamy, and the subject of queenship. He has lectured in Chinese and English on these topics in the United States, China, Taiwan, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, and France. He has published five books, Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-century Chinese Fiction (Brill, 1988), Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male/Female Relations in Eighteenth-century Chinese Fiction (Duke, 1995), The Fall of the God of Money: Opium Smoking in Nineteenth-century China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (University of Hawaii Press, 2010), and Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). He is currently writing a second volume to the last book, which will be about the history of imperial wives and concubines from the tenth to early twentieth centuries.

Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction

This book explores late Ming vernacular fiction focusing on the exposition of sexual transgression and the ideology of the containment of desire. Related topics include the theme of causality and its role in the story's mapping of the logic of adultery, adultery as an emblem of the woman's escape from containment, and the use of the narrative themes as a locus of sexual transgression. Published in 1988.

Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, the book examines how polygamous privilege functions in these novels and provides one of the first full accounts of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China. Published in 1995.

The Chinese translation of Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists.

Published in 2001.

The Fall of the God of Money: Opium Smoking in Nineteenth-century China

In this first cross-cultural study of opium in China, the book explores early Western observations of opium smoking, early definitions of addiction, the formation of arguments for and against the legalization of opium, the portrayals of opium smoking in Chinese poetry and prose, and scenes of opium-smoking interactions among male and female smokers and smokers of all social levels in 19th-century China. Published in 2002.

Review by Lars Peter Laamann, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 68, No. 3 (2005), pp. 494-495.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20181972

Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity

The book provides a literary history of the normative ideal of polygamy from the late Ming to the late Qing, countering the ideal with the theme of sublime love between two people. It argues that the fantasies of polygamy had intimate ties to the imagination of political power and sheds new light on texts that have been increasingly employed to redefine China's literary transition to modernity. The book reads late Qing love stories in a historically symbolic way by taking them as part of a larger fantasy of Chinese civilization undergoing fundamental crisis. Published in 2009.

Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao

Chinese emperors guaranteed male successors by taking multiple wives, in some cases hundreds and even thousands. Women Shall Not Rule offers a fascinating history of imperial wives and concubines, especially in light of the greatest challenges to polygamous harmony—rivalry between women and their attempts to engage in politics. Besides ambitious empresses and concubines, these vivid stories of the imperial polygamous family are also populated with prolific emperors, wanton women, libertine men, cunning eunuchs, and bizarre cases of intrigue and scandal among rival wives. Published in 2013